I have been asked whether John Mulholland, editor-designate of The Observer, will be the first Irish-born editor of a British national newspaper? The immediate answer, for those of us who believe Ireland is composed of 32 counties, is no. David Montgomery, born in Bangor, Co. Down, edited both the News of the World and Today. Monty, a Unionist, would not agree that he is Irish, of course.
So is Mulholland the first person born in the Republic to do the job? I think he might well be. Though there have been national paper editors with Irish backgrounds - such as William Francis Casey at The Times (1948-52) and Mike Molloy at the Daily Mirror (1975-85) - I can't discover a Republic-born editor throughout the 20th century.
Well before Ireland won its independence from Britain, and therefore well before it became a Republic, T.P. O'Connor, born in Athlone in 1848, edited national papers in Britain. A member of Charles Stewart Parnell's Home Rule League, he was the only Irish Nationalist MP elected to the Westminster parliament by a British constituency, in Liverpool, which he represented from 1885 until his death in 1929.
He also founded and edited several papers with national circulations, notably The Star, The Sun and TP's Weekly, a tabloid published from 1923 to 1929. There's a bust of T.P on a wall in Fleet Street.
Another O'Connor, born in Co. Cork, also edited a weekly paper that sold mainly in Yorkshire but it was widely read across all of Britain in the 19th century. Feargus O'Connor founded the Northern Star, a Chartist newspaper, in 1837 and edited it until 1852.
Anyway, am I right about Mulholland's claim to fame?
